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Debian Weekly News - September 14th, 1999



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Debian Weekly News 
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - September 14th, 1999
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Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer
community.

In security news, a buffer overflow in the inews program provided by
the INN news server has been [8]reported which would allow local users
privileges as gid 'news'. New versions of inewsinn, inn-dev and inn
have been made available at security.debian.org.

The Bug Tracking System has been upgraded to use the debbugs package,
and Darren Benham is the [9]new maintainer of the BTS. This is very
good news, because development has been going on in debbugs for some
time, and now the BTS will benefit from this and from future
enhancements. The BTS was down for a while this weekened for the
transition; no mail was lost.

An [10]interview with Matt Welsh contains some interesting
Debian-related tidbits. "I was a member of the original Debian team. I
invented dpkg, or the first version of it, which looked nothing like
what it looks like now " and "They [Debian] are great idealists, but
pragmatism sometimes has to step in."

Raphael Hertzog [11]posted a proposed structure for the QA group. This
includes a core QA team and a web site to coordinate thier work. The
plan is to greatly expand what the QA group works on, to include many
things besides maintaining orphaned packages.

A few packages broke this week in unstable. A new version of tar made
lintian [12]very confused; this has been fixed. And a new netstd
package split rsh into a separate package. That package is still in
Incoming, and until it reaches the archives, rsh isn't available.
Other things happening in unstable this week include:
  * The shadow suite now uses PAM. This includes login, passwd, su,
    etc. This is a [13]huge step toward making everything use PAM.
  * The long awaited redesign of the installation profiles has begun.
    Now there are "metapackages"; packages that depend on a group of
    packages that relate to a common activity, like playing games or
    developing C programs. Martin Bialasinski posted a [14]request for
    help coming up with lists of packages for each metapackage.
    
Should Debian move to GRUB as our [15]default boot loader? After all,
since GRUB is used by the Hurd, this would standardize the boot system
used for Debian Linux and Debian Hurd. Here is a [16]good summary of
pros and cons of using GRUB. Another con is that H. Peter Anvin is
working on a [17]new boot loader for linux that promises to be
superior to both. No conclusion has been reached on this, but no-one
seems especially attached to lilo.

And speaking of the Hurd, it's been a big week for the Hurd port, with
[18]44 updated packages, along with a new set of installation files.

Work on Debian JP continues and as usual a [19]summary is available,
covering topics from internationalization to a translated DFSG
document, and work on a Social Contract for Debian JP.

Followups to last week's news:
  * The item about the problems of BIND's copyright was picked up by
    [20]Linux Weekly News and later by [21]SlashDot. The maintainer of
    BIND began [22]talking with upstream about ways to resolve the
    problem, and it looks like a [23]solution has been found -- a
    "bind-norsa" tarball will be available.
  * Developers who want to migrate to GPG can read a [24]mini-HOWTO on
    the subject by Brian Almeida.
    
Thanks to Simon Hologate, Katsura S. Yoshio, and Randolph Chung for
[25]contributing.
  _________________________________________________________________

References
8. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-security-announce-99/msg00030.html
9. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/mail#1
10. http://www.linuxcare.com/news_columns/interviews/1999/09-13-99.epl
11. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-qa-9909/msg00013.html
12. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9909/msg00582.html
13. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9909/msg00613.html
14. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/mail#2
15. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9909/msg00493.html
16. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9909/msg00501.html
17. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9909/msg00588.html
18. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-hurd-9909/msg00094.html
19. http://www2.osk.3web.ne.jp/~shishamo/debian/trans/djwn/wn091299.html
20. http://www.lwn.net/1999/0909/
21. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/09/11/1013245&mode=nested
22. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9909/msg00585.html
23. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9909/msg00667.html
24. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9909/msg00702.html
25. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing

-- 
see shy jo


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